Gambling Big: ‘When you hear the poker chips rippling, there’s an energy’

There’s a sound like that made by crickets in the conference room at the Regency Hotel in Dublin. It’s the sound of hundreds of people flicking their poker chips. “When you hear the chips rippling in the room,” says professional poker player Tom Kitt, “there’s an energy.”

The night before the European Deepstack Main Event poker tournament, I join Kitt and his friend Rory Brown in their hotel room, as they watch football and drink craft beer. “I’ve a little ice bath going on in the bathroom,” Kitt tells me and offers me a bottle.

Kitt is generous, open and funny. Brown is also friendly, but a bit more serious. The two estimate there are about 50 professional players in Ireland. “A few of them would have a net deficit [every year],” says Brown. “Some would win millions.”

Brown discovered poker through a college society and then learned there were casinos he could play in. Kitt used to work in IT (he’s also a musician, like his brother David Kitt), but he played poker in the boardroom at lunchtime and “realised I didn’t have to pay for lunch”.

There was a poker boom in 2006 and 2007. “If you played cash games in town, knowing the basic rules, people were handing you money,” says Kitt. “You just had to play patiently and conservatively and wait for the best hand.”

Nowadays, Brown estimates he plays about 50 tournaments a year. They go to Vegas at least once a year and they also play online. “I probably play up to 16 tables on big huge monitors,” says Kitt. “For some guys it’s their full living. They’ve figured out mathematically how to put in the volume . . . For me it’s training camp. I’m all about the live tournaments.”

Brown and Kitt are staked. This means an investor pays for their entry to tournaments and takes 50 per cent of the winnings. If a player hasn’t won in a while, the money owed to their staker accumulates. They call that being “in make-up”.

No thumbs

Being in make-up means that sometimes when Kitt and Brown make big headline wins, they’re really only taking home a fraction of that amount. “But if you ever decide not to play the game anymore you just leave,” says Kitt and laughs. “They don’t come and take your thumbs.”

Very few players run away from make-up. “The community is very small,” says Brown. “If you do that, you’re kind of ostracised. You just leave poker.”

Their staker is a fellow player and friend of theirs, Sean Prendiville aka “the Goat”. “The three of us are a team,” says Kitt.

At the Regency, the players – overwhelmingly men – are sitting at tables underneath a large electronic screen filled with stats. Most are casually dressed. Some have sunglasses on or hoods up. Some wear eccentric headgear – cowboy hats, trilbies. There’s a scowling man in a jester’s hat. There’s an elderly man in a kilt. There’s a man in a T-shirt with a slogan that reads: “I am not addicted to poker.”

Many have good luck charms in front of them – a Roman centurion, a plastic Obelix, a dinosaur with a poker chip in its mouth. A few are drinking, their pints sitting on stools beside their seats. The pros, says Kitt, rarely drink and rarely call attention to themselves.

There are a lot of Scandinavians, possibly because events of this size are restricted in Scandinavian countries. Likewise, a Belfast man called Patrick McCann tells me he’s here because “the Presbyterians” restrict gambling north of the Border. There are also a lot of French men. “They’re the best craic,” says Kitt. They get receipts for everything, he says, because “they have to pay tax on their winnings”.

Generally there’s an atmosphere of grim, unsmiling determination with occasional outbreaks of bantering humour (“You have to be Scandinavian to sit at this table!” says one Dub to another). At a certain point masseuses appear and administer back and neck massages. “It’s a marathon,” says Kitt.

Over the next few days the tables whittle down. Those who make the final 10 per cent make “min cash” (double what they put in, says Kitt). The winner is set to make about €50,000.

Poker makes you philosophical, says Brown. “You stop being a results-based thinker. Poker teaches you that you can’t control the cards, that you can only control your decision-making with the information available . . . You’re dealing with percentages. Nothing is ever 100 per cent right or wrong. You have to make the right decision and then accept that the result is out of your control.”

Whenever Kitt sits down at a poker table he analyses each player and devises a strategy specifically for them. He knows the bluffers from the conservative players. He knows the pros and skilled enthusiasts from the “complete fish”.

‘I would be considered a shark’

He winces at the words. “It’s quite a derogatory term.” Then he says another word that makes him wince. “Shark.”

“I don’t like to think about that because then I feel a bit like a corporate guy coming in and gobbling them up. I would be considered a shark in the ecology of a game like this but I wouldn’t call myself that.”

Whereas at tournaments there’s not much at stake for amateur players (you can’t lose more than the entry fee – €570 in this case), there’s a more predatory element online. “If you go on as an inexperienced degenerate they will swarm all over you,” says Kitt. “They can see you coming. They’re waiting for you. And that person has zero chance . . . Get drunk and go online and you could lose the plot.”

Kitt has a supportive fiancee, but he sometimes worries about his career choice. There were times when he was “leading a double life, sweating it out working in a restaurant to pay the bills. [Then] I found it hard to call myself a professional poker player . . . The first question people ask at a wedding is, ‘What do you do?’ And I wonder, ‘Do I tell them?’ ”

‘It’s just maths’

Kitt and Brown call bad runs “downswings” and good runs “heaters.” They don’t refer to “luck”, they talk about “variance”. “Pros aren’t superstitious,” says Kitt. “It’s just maths.”

To go "on tilt" means to lose your control in a game, says Kitt. "It's happened to all of us." When Kitt won the Celtic Poker Tour – "a nice little wedge, 20 or 25 grand" – he took €10,000 to Vegas "and came back with 20 bucks." He laughs. "We do take shots . . . You put the head down and build it up again." Eight months later he won €83,000 in a tournament online.

“[A big win] burns a hole in your pocket in the early days,” says Kitt. “We’re not really capitalists even though we’re playing a capitalist game . . . When I won the big one online, I couldn’t go to the pub without buying everyone a drink. I went on a stag to Berlin and no one else was allowed pay.”

He’s more sensible now that he has responsibilities. He limits “cash games”, preferring tournaments.

“The next time I win something big it’s paying for the wedding and chipping away at the mortgage,” he says.

After four days, Kitt reaches the last table, comes fourth and leaves with €17,050 (“Though that’s not what ended up in my pocket”). The man with the kilt makes it to the final table, as do two women (“Totally representing!” says Kitt) and one formidable amateur Kitt admits he “underestimated”.

The final two at the table, a Swede and a Dutch man, make a deal and leave with €41,900 and €34,000 respectively.

“I’m a little disappointed,” says Kitt. But he’s feeling confident. He’s not in make-up. He’s “eyeing up a nice Vegas trip. My form is pretty good.” Series concluded